Hey all. Here’s the news on what’s happening with current/forthcoming builds from Zomboid HQ.

We’ve got public Vehicles beta 37 just about ready to drop – it includes:

• Work that stems from our friendly Technical Director favourite uncle Bitbaboon Steve on our netcode – intended to address MP lag via the discovery of elements of vehicle data clogging up the pipes, and the way that server saves work. We’ve also put some extra work into being more strict with what the game considers as physics objects, which should cut down on memory and processing. (Internally we’re seeing some higher FPS read-outs from built up areas like West Point, and we’d be very interested to hear if this is replicated on beta tester set-ups come release).

• New map areas filling in countryside, farms and smaller settlements between West Point and Riverside, and March Ridge and Rosewood. This includes new town zones and foraging zones, especially around Riverside – alongside missing map elements in that town, and general decoration map-wide. A few secret areas will be hiding in amongst it all too.

• In terms of gameplay – tire pressure’s impact on speed has been nerfed significantly, while we’ve also polished the Mechanic UI to give clearer indications of success/failure via visuals and SFX. A fair amount of irritation caused by dual keybindings (on foot vs. in vehicle key functions) will also be cleared up.

• Connall, fresh from zoning the new map, is now coming back to the ‘Small But Important’ Community Request thread – while elsewhere the general bug blitz continues when it comes to vehicle textures, item transfer speeds, crawlers damaging vehicles and zombies attacking the relevant part of the car where you’re visible to them (or were last visible to them) as opposed to banging on the driver door. The annoying issue of occasional item loss has also been tracked down and, hopefully, consigned to oblivion.

• New vehicle SFX for vans and higher performance vehicles are part of the new build. Although, with this said, these still aren’t perfect – so we have found someone who works at a friend’s game studio who’s created a procedural engine sound system – which means we can obtain custom engine loops for different car types to feed into Bitbaboon Steve’s new code. This means that we no longer have to dredge internet sound banks, or consider making actual vehicle recordings ourselves – and likewise will make the process easier when adding new vehicles, and hopefully noisier industrial/military vehicles, later on down the line.

Vehicle beta 37 had been aimed for a Thursday release but internal testing has revealed some FPS hitches in MP as well as occasional unsightly streaks that would likely annoy. We’ll release when these irritations are nixed, and have Uncle Bitbaboon Steve on duty tomorrow to help improve stuff further too.

Outside this more imminent work on vehicles coding continues for the builds ahead including Bitbaboon Mark preparing the animation system so we can move over to it in the versions beyond vehicles, Turbo back with us and working on his improved snow/fog/mist and general weather upgrade, and General Arcade’s Stas working on our new chat/admin system for MP.

(With the latter we’re slightly changing tack and opting for a less multi-tabbed variant, and have also compiled a checklist for Stas to ensure that all the commands/features are in-keeping with what’s expected from MP in this day and age so we hit the ground running with something we’re pleased with. It should still be ready to drop into testing once vehicles are done.)

While discussing this with Stas, the issue of PZ text appearing really small on high resolution screens came up – itself something we know we have to deal with, and hope to as a part of our upgrade to lwjgl3. In the mean-time, however, if you have issues then as a part of our conversations EnigmaGrey also came up with this nifty Big Freakin’ Font mod – that’ll help with high res and couch play users. Let us know how you get on with it.

This week’s snowfield caper from Wanktarded. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Fanks!